Housing and public policy.

Summary Although the importance of housing in the well-being of individuals is well known, this field is largely under-investigated by French economists. There is a real lack of quantitative studies that show a causal link between public policies and their impact on housing. This thesis aims to fill this gap by producing empirical results with French data, but also to develop innovative methodologies for the implementation of econometric evaluation techniques of public policies. The thesis is divided into two main parts and includes three original contributions. In the first part, we place ourselves in the framework of hedonic prices. We evaluate, for the city of Marseille, the price that households attribute to living in one neighborhood rather than another. The second part focuses on the evaluation of public policies concerning housing. We evaluate two French legislative schemes. The first one is the so-called Scellier scheme, which allows to benefit from tax advantages when buying real estate for rent. We use the fact that the scheme applies only in certain areas to assess the impact of the scheme on property prices. The second evaluation concerns Article 55 of the SRU law, which requires certain municipalities to have more than 20 percent social housing, subject to financial penalties. As part of this evaluation, we are developing an innovative methodology to measure the incentive nature of the law on the effective production of social housing.